I'll wait to reserve full judgment until all the details come out, but from what is known it's pretty clear tht Nationwide Series driver Jeremy Clements has screwed up big time.

Sources have told ESPN that the little-known driver used a racial slur in an interview with a reporter this past weekend at Daytona. The exact details are not out, but if he did do what the sources say, it's inexcusable.

NASCAR is a sport with a not-so-impressive past in the area of racial sensitivity (see Wendell Scott as exhibit A; they were so backward on race relations that they wouldn't even give him his trophy after he won a race). So to have drivers perpetuate that legacy at a time when NASCAR is starting to work hard on its diversity efforts is something that just can't happen.

If you want to be ignorant on your own time, that's your problem. But when you're a public figure (though Clements was so anonymous I suppose that's debatable), you can't talk that way to reporters. It's not going to end well.